Entertainment

The Journalist's Guide to YouTube

Leah Betancourt is the digital community manager at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minn. She is @l3ahb3tan on Twitter.

When you think of YouTube, you probably think of viral videos such as choreographed wedding procession dances and sneezing pandas. But YouTube's content load is massive — 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute — and it has a lot more to offer than just silly, viral videos. One area of YouTube that is currently growing like a weed is news.

News videos fall into three categories: rebroadcasts of current material; original videos and distribution of news; and archive of older video footage. Media companies, indie news organizations, and even citizen journalists are putting YouTube’s voluminous video database to work in all three ways, and the lines between these three uses tend to blur and overlap.

Rebroadcasting Current News

YouTube users are hungry for news, and over the last two years, traffic to the site’s News and Politics category has grown to more than 650 percent. The site has more than 200 news partners, including television news stations, newspapers, hyperlocal video news sites such as VidSF, and non-profit citizen journalism organizations such as the UpTake.

Visitors can get a snapshot of what’s happening in the News and Politics section by going to its CitizenTube blog and video channel, said Steve Grove, head of News and Politics at YouTube. Grove said the blog also served as a breaking news hub during post-election protests in Iran.

“We internally track the most interesting videos in the News and Politics space,” he said. “It’s kind of our editorial voice.”

Local News Delivery

YouTube launched the News Near You area of its News page in April. It geo-locates site users by their IP address, sees if there are any partners within 100 miles and then displays video clips uploaded within the past week from its “white list” of news partners and citizen reporters. If there are no videos within that 100-mile radius, YouTube mines its clips at the state level and displays them to site visitors.

“News Near You ensures that we get the right news content in front of the right people,” Grove said. “The idea here is to increase the number of impressions. Some clips have gone viral beyond their local audience.”

He said the result has been a high click-through rate on those videos of 5 to 10 percent. According to Grove, the videos tend to be feature-related because that’s what news partners upload. Not only is viewership growing, but so are the sources of news videos on the site. YouTube has asked a whopping 25,000 news sources on Google News to be sources of video for the site, according to a recent New York Times report.

“This is an ongoing process, and we continue to do outreach to news publishers about the benefits of sharing their video on YouTube and on Google News. So far the response has been very positive and more and more news outlets see the value of distributing their content on these two platforms,” said Spencer Crooks, a YouTube spokesman.

The one-two punch of a growing number of YouTube news partners and a farther reach with local news to relevant viewers potentially pits them against TV news stations. However, a lot depends on the quality of the content.

Stacey Woelfel, chairman of the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), said in an e-mail interview he thinks News Near You will probably be successful and could put more information in the hands of local news consumers. “But how YouTube defines ‘news’ will set a lot of the tone. Will it really be news, or will it be videobloggers spewing opinion? That’s not news,” he said. “Also, just how many mainstream news organizations participate will also dictate quality. I can’t see it as an ultimately complete source of local news, but I can see it as a nice supplement.”

YouTube has an ad revenue-sharing agreement with partners from ads in videos and banner ads running next to the partner’s videos. Grove said the News Near You feature doesn’t change any of the agreements.

Tapping the Crowd to Create Original Content

In 2007, CNN teamed up with YouTube for two debates of Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls. The Republican Primary debate took place Nov. 28, 2007, and the Democratic Primary debate was July 23, 2007.

Individuals made videos of themselves asking questions and uploaded them to YouTube. Participants could also post video responses to the questions YouTube users uploaded. Questions were vetted by a CNN editorial group of about eight to ten people. There were 38 questions picked for the Democratic debate and 34 questions picked for the Republican debate, and the debates ran live on CNN, where candidates were asked the YouTube-submitted questions.

David Bohrman, senior vice president and CNN’s Washington D.C. bureau chief, said that at the time having a debate with viewers asking the questions was a really intriguing idea.

More than 4.4 million viewers watched CNN’s Republican Primary debate, more than all other primary debates in cable new history, according to CNN. The Democratic Primary debate was the second-highest rated debate in history at 4 million viewers.

“It was a series of steps that fell together,” Bohrman said. He added that he doesn’t think there will be another presidential election season that doesn’t have input from voters, indicating that the CNN-YouTube experiment essentially changed the landscape of American politics.

Archive of Older Videos

Media companies have used their YouTube Channel pages in an effort to reinforce branding and reach more viewers via retro vids such as news stories to mark historical moments, bloopers, vintage on-air promos, and even off-the-air antics.

These are the type of videos that couldn't necessarily be shown on the air, but which viewers connect with, or that once shown might be forgotten if not for the ability for viewers to recall them on demand on the Internet. By hosting these videos on YouTube, news organizations can reach new audiences and extend the shelf life of older stories.

How Journalists Can Use YouTube

Running YouTube clips uploaded by individuals as part of a news story is a much more important and effective use of YouTube for news purposes than using the site as a distribution channel, according to RTNDA’s Woelfel. He cautioned that there are some caveats such as phony video, but that RTNDA has coverage guidelines for news managers to help them navigate the area of user-generated content.

“We at the TV stations already have ways to get video stories out on air and on our web sites. But it’s still reasonably tough to get video to us. [YouTube] makes that easy for just about everyone,” he said.

Citizen journalists looking to hone their newsgathering, reporting and even interviewing skills can learn from leading industry pros with the YouTube Reporters' Center. The channel launched April 30 and contains how-to videos on newsgathering, reporting, media ethics, shooting video and editing.

“It’s kind of journalism school on YouTube,” YouTube's Grove said.

Videos include the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward on investigative journalism, PolitiFact's Guide to Fact-Checking, the Pulitzer Center's tips for video journalists, and a four-part series on storytelling by Ira Glass, the host of Chicago Public Radio’s “This American Life.”

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